Wooly brown carpet

The beach I chose for the low tide exploration this year is an an old glacier plain; an almost flat expanse of sandstone, interspersed with groups of large rocks, usually lined up as if shoved to the side by a sliding glacier, with a few large erratics near the low tide mark. The sandstone is scored in straight lines, some parallel to the shore, others heading straight out to the channel. Glacier tracks.

I've been here before, at mid-tide levels. Not often; the beach has not been easily accessible. The access point is at the end of a dead-end road with three houses on it, which in turn is an off-shoot of a slightly longer dead-end road. To reach the beach, I had to climb a parking barrier, then scramble down a rocky drop-off. Until now; now someone has made a short path skirting the fence and dropping down the side on easy steps. Nice!

Looking northish. Showing eroded slab of sandstone, long scratch mark. Note the green sea urchins at the base of the slab. More on these later.

Glacier tracks. With purple sea urchin.

Seaweed-covered  beaches can be tricky. It's hard to tell what's underneath, whether rolling rocks or sudden holes or slimy mud; I have fallen several times. luckily without too much damage. This flat sandstone beach is safer; there are few rocks, and the holes are shallow.

But there's always slippery seaweed. Even on this shore, my feet slip on the green and yellow seaweeds. But here, there's a carpet of a brown, scratchy, wiry seaweed. The patches are interspersed with areas where sea lettuce, rockweed, and bag algae grow, all very slippery underfoot. Mostly, I skirted these areas, walking confidently on the slip-proof carpet.

Looking south. With red sea urchin. The erratic at the left was just at the edge of the water when the tide turned.

The seaweed is called "beauty bush". I'm not sure why. It's brown, lumpy, shapeless except at a close view.

Beauty bush, Callithamnion pikeanum. With rockweed and big barnacles.

This is one of the coarser members of this family of red algae, and it is usually purplish brown to reddish brown in color. It is perennial and so extremely densely branched that it appears woolly. (E-Flora BC)

I broke off one branch to get a better look.

The little round branchlets almost look like evergreen cones.

My guide book, Marine Life of the Pacific Northwest, comments that it is "reminiscent of a miniature fir tree lying on its side."

In the upper intertidal zone, I find mainly tiny periwinkle snails, hermit crabs in periwinkle shells, the occasional whelk, and barnacles. And seaweed: mostly sea lettuce and sea hair, all very slippery underfoot.

The lower intertidal zone is another story. So much to see! Even a couple of lifers! Tomorrow, an ambitious chiton.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

La playa que escogí este año para el dia de la marea baja es una antigua llanura glacial: un campo casi completamente plano hecho de arenisca, entrelazada con grupos de piedras grandes, casi todos alineados, como si hubieran sido empujado a un lado por una montaña de hielo ambulante. Hay unos bloques erráticos cerca del nivel más bajo de la zona intramareal. Se ha cortado la arenisca en lineas rectas, a lo largo de la costa, o dirigiéndose directamente al mar. Huellas glaciales.

He visitado antes, al nivel mediano intramareal. No tan frecuentemente, porque la playa no ha sido de fácil acceso; se llega por un callejón sin salida, donde solamente hay tres casas; este callejón se deriva de otro callejón sin salida un tantito más largo. Para llegar a la playa había que trepar sobre una barda del estacionamiento, y luego hacerse camino entre rocas al nivel de la arena. Hasta ahora: esta vez descubrí que alguien ha hecho un senderito que evita la barda y baja por escalones a la playa. ¡Qué bien!

Primera foto: mirando al norte, mostrando el borde de la plancha de arenisca, y una grieta glaciar. Se ve un grupo de erizos de mar verdes al lado de la plancha. De estos, veremos más adelante. 

Segunda foto: una grieta glacial. Y un erizo de mar morado.

Las playas con muchas algas pueden ser peligrosas. No se puede ver lo que hay abajo, sea piedras rodantes u hoyos inesperados o lodo resbaloso; me he caído varias veces, por suerte sin mayores daños. Esta playa de arenisca, plana y sólida, es más segura. Hay pocas piedras y los hoyos son de poca profundidad.

Pero siempre hay algas marinas resbalosas. Aun en esta playa, mis pies se me van caminando sobre las algas verdes y amarillas. Pero aquí también hay un tapete de alga café, rasposa, como si fuera de alambre. Hay grandes areas donde crece la lechuga de mar, sargaso vejigoso, y alga de bolsita, pero les dí la vuelta, caminando con confianza sobre ese tapete anti-resbalante.

Tercera foto: mirando hacia el sur. Con un erizo de mar rojo. El bloque errático en el agua, estaba casi fuera por completo cuando la marea llegó a su punto más bajo.

La alga marina café se llama en inglés "arbusto de belleza", no me imagino porque.

Cuarta foto: "arbusto de belleza" con sargaso vejigoso, y unos bálanos grandes.

"Este es uno de los miembros más ásperos de esta familia de algas rojas, y casi siempre es de un color café morado a café rojizo. Es perenne y tan densamente ramificada que parece de lana." (De E-Flora BC)

Quinta foto: rompí una ramita para verla mejor. Las ramitas parecen conos de pino.

Mi libro guía, Marine Life of the Pacific Northwest, hace el comentario que "trae a la memoria un abeto caído."

En la zona superior intramareal de esta playa, encuentro caracoles de mar "bígaro", ermitaños en concha de bígaro, una que otra bocina, y bálanos. Y algas marinas de las resbalosas.

Aquí en la zona baja, la situación cambia. ¡Tantas cosa que hay! ¡Incluso algo que nunca había visto antes! Mañana, empiezo con un quiton muy valiente.

Tiles laid by a drunk glacier.

Many of the beaches along the Campbell River shore are mostly flat sandstone scattered with large erratics. In places, this sandstone is covered with a layer of green algae, making it look like a lawn or golf course. (With huge golf balls.)

In other spots, the sandstone lies open to the sky and waves, with very little life on it. Mostly, it shows up in flat slabs or even chipped-off layers:

Sharp-edged chip. Rockweed for scale. The chip is about 6 to 8 inches long.

But on one section of the Shell Road shore, the stone is scored in mostly rectangular sections, looking man-made, like tiles laid by someone without a ruler.

Straight line cuts. Some almost perfectly right-angled.

A larger tile.

Glaciers sliding out to sea might explain a straight line of scored rock. But the cuts at right angles to these? How did that come about?

Another section of tiles, overlapping.

The more I pay attention to what's around me, the more amazing this whole earth becomes.

Forgotten beasties

From the "hold" folder, a few beach critters:

Wosnesenski's isopod. I think I held this photo because I wanted to id the tentacly bit near the isopod's rear. I still don't know what it is.

Three snails. Shell road beach, September, 2018. Half the snails I see turn out to be hermit crabs; I think the one on the left may have a hermit in residence; see the tips of her toes.

Three crabs; red rock, green shore, and a hermit. I like the pie-crust look of the red rock crab's carapace. April, 2018

Unidentified polychaete, stretching out of its tube.

A thin slab of wood, riddled with teredo clam burrows. The white bits are remains of the clam's burrow lining.

Using all three eyes

The camera sees more - and less - than my eyes do. Flipping rocks along the shore, left-handed, with the camera in the right hand, finger on the shutter button, I disturb crabs, who scuttle quickly under the next-door stone. Flip another; crabs. Another; more crabs. One stops to threaten me, pincers raised. "Come on, see if you dare!" I turn the camera in her direction, and she changes her mind and joins her friends under shelter.

Another stone. More racing crabs. Once they're gone, I see slow movement; flatworms. The camera sees them, unless the light is just exactly right, as brown smears. My eyes see the movement, the merest hint of it, going in a different direction than the slither next to it, the next flatworm.

Whelk egg cases, spiral tube-worms, and flatworms on the underside of a stone.

Wosnesenski's isopods, one lying upside-down for some reason, showing off his 14 legs. And a pair of crabs.

Sometimes, there's a nano-second of flurry, a miniscule splash; a baby sculpin, an inch long, gone to ground, now invisible. Maybe the camera will see him; I won't. But I saw the splash.

Some animals are only recognized, in these surroundings, by their movement. I learn to see them; the merest rise and fall of a limpet under the seaweed gluing herself down to the rock while the light threatens her; the split-second flip-flip-flip of a gunnel, the shrinking of an anemone, the characteristic sideways scuttle of a miniature hermit - snail shells don't move like that without a hermit resident; the writhing of a polychaete worm becoming one with the mud underneath, the squirting of a clam retreating deeper into the mud. The camera never sees those.

Spiral tubeworms, flatworms (the light was right- look for the eyes!) and a limpet, still on the move. I don't know what that tiny thing with the striped back"bone" on the stony patch in the centre is.

My eyes miss the very tiny critters. My reading glasses are in my pocket; they get in the way when I look through the viewfinder, and the light is too bright to see the screen. So I point and shoot, looking for the green square that says the auto-focus has found something interesting. Or find a safe, non-painful (broken barnacles are sharp!) place to kneel so that I can get my head down a few inches from the stones and look through the viewfinder.

White shells, a sea of white shells; must be barnacles. The camera knows better. Waving seaweeds; no, the camera discovers tentacles or antennae. Or a mass of worms.

The camera saw these. I didn't.

This photo includes two masses of ribbon worms; the upper one is a knot of Paranemertes peregrina (p. means wandering), the purple ribbon worm, with a very purple body and a creamy belly; the orange ribbon worm, Tubulanus polymorphus; and the green ribbon worm, Emplecotnema gracile, with its green top and yellow belly.

The lower knot appears to be all green ribbon worms.

And there are three flatworms and a trio of crabs.

Sometimes things are easier; I find an underwater species tossed up to die on the shore. These I can pick up and move to a better background.

Unidentified species of hydrocoral. Notice the yellow "bud" at the tip of the branches.

Habitat for the critters found above. The stripes parallel to the shore are probably old glacier tracks on sandstone.

Decorator colours

The plumose anemone in my tank has a brown column and  beige tentacles, a common combination. Often, though, they are white on white; a white column, and whiter tentacles. I had never seen one with a green head before.

Plumose anemone, Metridium senile in the tidepool under the glacial erratic. With green tentacles.

I browsed images on Google; I found a few white "Mets" with pale green tentacles, always in photos taken during a dive. This one is in a few inches of water. And that was the colour as my eyes saw it; I used the flash, because the anemone was in shade, but those tentacles were a definite blue-green.

Another. This one has white tentacles, but the base is a pale blue.

This one matches the one in my tank. Some of the red blotches around it are tubeworm "flowers".

Another "normal" M. senile.

Deep under the rock, starfish wait out the dry spell. The flat, spread out anemone seems to be a burrowing anemone, with its mouth exposed. Must have just eaten something. Maybe one of those little fish?

More vivid colours. A deep pink tubeworm, still fishing while the water lasts. The pink-tipped green anemones below have shut down for now.

Even the hermit crabs are wearing party colours. I spotted this one with those bright blue pincers, like the one I brought home last week.

Three hermits, a dead kelp crab,and limpets. The deep red  critters at bottom right are not fish; they're shreds of seaweed.

Kelp crabs are usually a dull olive green, sometimes greenish brown. I don't know if this one was joining the explosion of colour in his lifetime, or if there's some sort of blue-green algae that took over his carapace and legs after he died.

This photo was taken aiming straight down into a foot-deep rounded hole. There are many of these near the bottom of the intertidal zone; circular holes, smooth-walled, looking like someone at some time removed a bowling ball from the rock. What causes this? I don't know.

I am always on the lookout for nice whelk shells for my hermits at home. Here, around this erratic, there are many whelks, all healthy and shiny, but no empty shells. And almost every hermit crab I saw was wearing a smashed and broken shell. What happened to the fresh shells?

I feel sorry for these hermits; the ones I brought home were quick to switch into intact shells; they do know the difference. I almost feel like collecting some decent shells from my tank and spreading them around this tide pool. Or would the tide immediately haul them off and slam them against the rocks until they were full of holes?

Questions, questions.

Just out of reach

I'm fascinated by the pool under the erratic boulder; I went back again today, and discovered new and amazing things again. More photos to be processed!

So far, I've not found the area dry, so all the photos (and what I saw) are warped under a hand's length of wind-blown water. Some look like abstract paintings:

A cozy home to assorted chitons, various anemones, starfish, encrusting pink algae, barnacles, whelks, and many hermits in smashed shells.

5 or more chitons here. Look for the reddish girdle, with a paler central oval. 

A sample red-girdled chiton, very tiny, found on a rock. 8 pale shell segments and a red-brown girdle.

Another of the black leather chitons. Several species live under this rock.

The view from the access point. The second erratic, where the pool is, is on the far, far right.

Today I walked around the point to a third, slightly smaller erratic, but couldn't quite reach it because the tide was too high, and I was keeping my so-called "waterproof" shoes dry. They can handle an inch of water, but no more, and it's a long walk back with squelchy socks.

Another day, another low tide. At least the weather is finally cooperating.

I brought home another Giant Pacific chiton, very dead; it's soaking now in hydrogen peroxide. If all works out, I'll eventually have photos of the internal shells.

Next: surprising anemones.

Sand trap

Another find on the same flat beach:

Unidentified sponge, as found at the top of the intertidal zone.

At home, dried and cleaned up. Sand still fills many of the pores. 7 inches diameter.

The sponge had evidently been ripped out of its home and tossed up by the waves. It was still damp, and on the underside, where the sunshine didn't reach, it was orange. The green spots seem to be the green algae that grows on everything. Once the sponge was dry, the orange colour disappeared.

Sponges are difficult to identify, especially out of context. (The Encyclopedia lists 26 undetermined sponges after their photos of named species.) I think this may possibly be an Orange Finger sponge, Neoesperiopsis rigida, a sponge I remember seeing on the underside of a local dock. They may be quite varied in shape and colour: INaturalist has a series of photos demonstrating this: pale orange, pink, brownish, but not green; long and skinny, or in rounded clumps.

A sponge is an animal that is basically a filtration device. The "fingers" are hollow; water flows in through the porous walls and is pumped out through the larger upper opening. Food particles, tiny plankton, shreds of organic material, get filtered out along the way.

A closer look at some of the "fingers".

Whoppers

On a third visit to the sandstone and erratics beach, I discovered two of the largest chitons I have seen so far, unfortunately dead, left behind by the retreating tide.

Giant Pacific chiton, aka gumboot chiton, Cryptochiton stelleri. This specimen was a bit over 6 inches long. Adults may grow to 14 inches.

Quoting from my Encyclopedia:

"The largest chiton in the world! The giant Pacific chiton's eight shells are completely and cryptically overgrown by girdle."

No other chiton in this area has all 8 plates covered by the mantle, nor grows this large. (From wallawalla.edu)

The mantle was eroded, firm and slightly porous. The shells were only visible as ridges underneath the flesh of the mantle. And from the underside, where the meat had been torn away.

Upside-down chiton. Three shell shapes are exposed.

This chiton has gills along the sides of the foot. The white lines in the grooves here may be bits of the gills. The mantle covers the whole top and laps over the edges, leaving only the foot exposed. Here, it has retracted somewhat as it dried.

These chitons (at least other, less unlucky, members of their families) may live up to 20 years, never straying more than a few metres from home base, at the bottom of the intertidal zone and a bit further out to sea.

Google image of the beach. Access is from a driveway-length road, Shell Road.

Shell Road Beach location

Making do

On a wide, flat beach, the tide races in and out, even as it creeps up more sloped shores. The current polishes rocks, re-shapes sand structures, digs holes behind stones. On sandy shores, mobile critters hurry to grab onto stones, scramble underneath seaweed, or burrow deep into the sand. On Boundary Bay, I have seen an incautious hermit crab, caught in the open as the water receded, swept off his feet and out to deeper water, rolling over and over helplessly.

On a hard sandstone base, the challenges are tougher. Where to hide? A scrap of broken stone, a clump of rockweed, maybe a ledge between sandstone plates. But the safe spots are few and far between. Life gets difficult.

On the sandstone flats last week, I was again looking for whelk shells for my growing hermits. In an hour of walking, I saw a half-dozen live whelks. But only two empty shells, both smashed and useless. (Or so I thought at the time.)

There were other snails, plenty of them, all tiny and tinier. Many of them turned out to be leftovers now being worn by tiny hermit crabs. I picked up a teaspoon-full to examine at home.

In a tide pool, I noticed a couple of larger hermits. And these demonstrated the difficulty of finding proper clothing in a whelk-shell desert; the shells they were wearing were all badly broken, some barely there. I took pity on several and brought them home.

In a tray at home. Grainy hand hermit in holey shell, and one of the tinies, also in a broken shell.

Hairy hermit in half a shell.

Another hairy hermit, in the tank now, on the prowl searching for a better shell.

At home, I looked them over, then added them to the aquarium. A few minutes later, one was wearing a new white shell. Several others were busy inspecting the assortment on offer. By evening, they were all properly dressed.

Amazing blue pincers on this grainy hand hermit! He's wearing one of the newer shells, but still wondering if another would fit better. In the end, he stayed with the first one.

The tiny hermits, some just bigger than a pinhead, are mostly black and white-legged ones, with a few of the tiny orange hermits. Many of them also needed new shells, but my tank is well stocked; they are all happily trundling about in their new outfits.

Leopard skin and sequins

I found this sculpin lying on the beach, still bright and richly patterned, even as he lay dead.

He's about 8 inches long.

The belly and tail are a black and tan leopard skin print, the head is decorated in sequinned sunbursts, continuing down the sides with shiny chevrons. And look at those icicle-turquoise spines at the sides!

Zooming in.

I think this is a buffalo sculpin, Enophrys bison; these are extremely variable in colour and pattern, but the raised scales down the sides and the long spines at the back of the cheeks are distinguishing features. Most of the buffalos have several white or light-coloured bands across the body; this one has two.

Under a glaring sun

Where the intertidal flats are mostly flat slabs of sandstone, critters that usually hide in the sand under rocks when the water recedes, quickly burrowing deeper when their rocks are flipped, either just put up with unfiltered sunlight, or cling tightly to the underside of what few stones are available. There's nowhere to run.

A half-dozen hermit crabs and a Wosnesenski's isopod struggle to stay in the shade of a trio of mussels. I replaced their stone roof gently where I found it.

The sand is a thin dusting on the sandstone. There's no shelter for the critters that can't run and hide elsewhere.The anemones here are under about a half-inch of water.

The green algae, the red seaweed, and the anemones don't mind the sunlight. Even at full tide, they're exposed to it, just slightly shaded by the clear water.

This green algae is probably the same one that pollutes my aquarium, always growing first on the walls closest to the light. The pink-tipped green anemones also benefit from sunlight; they do not photosynthesize, being animals, but carry symbiotic algae in their tissues; these algae produce enough food for themselves and some over for the anemone that hosts them.

Crunchies

The sandstone shore around the glacial erratic I visited last week, exposed at mid-tide, is densely populated by large barnacles. Millions of them; billions, maybe.

Thatched acorn barnacles*; one small patch.

I felt guilty, walking across this beach: crunch, crunch: at every step I could hear breaking shells. I tried to find spots with no barnacles to put my feet down, but there were few.

At one point, I turned and examined the barnacle I had just stepped on. There it stood, undisturbed, solid as ever. How strong are those shells? I think, possibly, the crunches I heard were dead, empty shells; they seem easy to break, from the right angle. More experiments are needed.

Stone formation, with barnacles, oysters, gull and more.

Farther down the beach, below the erratic, a few slabs of stone stood like a fence against the waves. Here, I found more barnacles, and a scattering of oysters, each one firmly cemented to the rock. The dark green stuff is rockweed.

More than meets the eye.

All across this plain, and crammed into every niche in the rocks, tiny critters go about their business, dwarfed by the barnacles. Looking closely, I found hundreds of pinhead snails. (But when I brought a handful home, most of them contained miniature orange-legged hermit crabs.) In the photo above, only one hermit crab is identifiable, but most of the blue-black snails are probably hermits, too. In the lower third, left of centre, a yellow patch is made up of whelk egg cases. And here and there, limpets try to blend into the rock.

Empty barnacle shell and black rock algae.

I brought home a few barnacles to clean my tank and feed my barnacle-loving snails. Checking them over before I added them to the aquarium, I found several healthy flatworms. No matter how strong a barnacle shell may be, these worms can slither through the cracks between plates, kill and eat the barnacle inside. Some flatworms may even eat the oysters.

*Barnacles may be hard to identify, but the thatched acorn has a black feeding foot. The barnacles that came home with me all have black cirri.